


Miscarriage

by orphan_account



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Grief, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 17:59:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10366263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They both search for meaning in the aftermath, but Joe's return casts a long shadow over their grief.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Please be advised that this story is about Hardy and Ellie's grief over a miscarriage partially caused by Joe's return - themes could be triggering, so proceed with caution.

 

When she was a child, Ellie tells him, she used to dream that the hospital could hold memories within its walls.

His eyes are fixed vaguely upon the pile of bloody cotton wool beside the bed, the steel instruments lined up that seem too cruel, too cold, too sharp to be near Ellie’s soft skin. The doctors are performing their fearful tampering with less urgency now. It is drawing to an end.

'It made me wonder,' she whispers, 'what stories these walls would tell if they could speak.'

He's holding her hand as tightly as he can. He fancies he can see her spirit quivering in her limbs, and the doctors seem to prick her soul whenever they touch her flesh.

This is where her grandfather died, Ellie continues. Her cheeks are drenched with tears. She clenches her teeth suddenly, clamps down on his hand and groans through a painful motion. Her head drops back upon the mattress. She's shining with sweat.

This is where Tom and Fred were born, she says. This is where he himself had died and come back to life. How many other tales of love, death and horror did this hospital hold? Did this place remember her, like she remembered it?

The nurse touches her shoulder with a powder-gloved hand and tells her it’s almost over. The coppery smell of blood and the reek of disinfectant settle at the back of his throat as he breathes in, heavy and cloying; he will associate both odours with this moment for as long as he lives.

 _A boy,_ they tell him as they take away something small.

 _Christopher,_ says Ellie, shaking, her wet eyes fixed on the ceiling. _Kit, for short. After my grandfather._

 _My son,_ he thinks to himself, and Ellie begins to wail. She screams and screams until he's sure she's torn her lungs to pieces, and then she lies still as death. The tiniest fluttery breaths, tiny as the beating of butterfly wings, are all that betray she still lives.

The doctors burn him the same day, and they bury him in the churchyard. All those pieces of _you and I,_ all those fond dreams of the future, reduced to dust, to disappointment, to  _never meant to be._

*

There is an evidence wall in their house, and it grows with each passing day.

 _We shouldn’t let Tom see,_ she’d once said, an anguished look on her face. Tom is his father’s son, unalterably. But now that Tom’s father is as good as his unborn brother’s murderer, as well as Danny’s murderer, the rule slips.

 _Shock,_ the doctor had explained apologetically. _With your husband back, and the problems he’s been causing, little wonder..._

The threats. The phone calls. The custody battle. The hatred. The comments about her swelling stomach that had set her trembling. And then, Fred’s near-kidnapping. The confrontation. Ellie alone.

 _Little wonder,_ the doctor had said, and the phrase rattles in Hardy’s head like a crooked windchime hung with bones.

_Little wonder. Little wonder._

And then, Joe's voice, a sneer -

_Little wonder it died inside you._

There is nothing inside Ellie but anger and despair now. Every morning it is as if she tosses a coin to decide which one will rule her today. 

Heads for anger. 

Tails for despair.

Two options, and a million ways for them to manifest.

 *

She sleeps with her back to him, most nights, and he does not sleep at all. He finds himself roaming the house like a moth trapped in a glass jar, battering itself to death against the translucent walls in desperation to reach some distant light. He works; that's what he does, he works and works, looks for a way to make the charges stick, searches for a way to put things right, fix his mess, or turn back time.

He knows, deep down, that the answer does not lie in that jumbled evidence wall with its ugly pictures of Joe, his name printed across countless documents, leering at them like a devil. But it does not stop him from searching.

They had lost one child, but he had two more sons to protect, and a daughter whom he loved beyond sense, beyond reason, beyond life. 

*

Ellie's grief fills whole rooms. It nests in damp places, in cupboards, in the silence that lies between them like a sword. It curls on top of the piles of laundry that never get washed, the food that grows mouldy in the kitchen, the dishes that pile up in the sink.

It hangs, delicate and cruel, from the spiderwebs above the empty crib in the room Ellie cannot bear to clear out.

For her sake as much as his, Hardy cages his grief. He waits until he is alone on the cliffs to let it out. It escapes his lungs through stoic, gritted teeth, and hangs in the sky like a poisonous cloud, a noxious fog that blankets all of Broadchurch. 

He hates this town. Hates it irrationally. Hates it, hates himself.

If he dared to lift the stone and expose what lay beneath, he'd see this fresh loathing was because he'd looked forward to raising his son here. The mere thought sticks hatpins into his brain. He buries his face in his hands, pushes the heels of his hands against his eye sockets, nearly buckles under the weight of guilt and pain and love.

He goes home and hugs Daisy fiercely. Her hair smells just as it did when she was a toddler, when she’d been small enough to sweep in his arms.

She tells him it hurts to be held this tight, and though he mumbles an apology he cannot let go.

*

Ellie takes the boys to the park. While she is gone, Hardy and an obliging PC Bob clear out the baby’s room. Everything is gone when she returns.

She has never been so angry with him.

They war beneath that roof, as they have for weeks now, but this time it does not end with frigid silence and wishing they had not raised their voices.

Fred wails when he leaves. Ellie does not let him kiss the boy goodbye.

A part of her, he realises later, had been clinging to the delusion that if she imprisoned Joe, perhaps their son would arrive after all. Perhaps, if she could just solve this case, it would save all her children, even the one already lost. 

It is a delusion he shares more than he realises.

* 

The two of them are continents divided. A vast ocean of shared suffering separates them, even as it links their poor wounded souls, so carved up with fault lines.

She stops breathing when they pass each other in the street. He sees confusion, grief, hatred, love, all mixed up in brown eyes that mirror his own.

 _It's your fault,_ he remembers her shouting, her upper lip curled and her teeth bared in a snarl.  _It's your fault. If you hadn't..._

She reads all the terrible things she said to him in his tragic countenance. But they are too raw just yet, and the coin has come up heads today. So she ducks her head and continues on, her fists clenched, tears crowding her eyes.

He should resent this treatment, but he would be naïve to think there is anyone Ellie blames more than herself.

* 

He remembers the last time he'd slept peacefully; Ellie had been wearing purple pyjamas with flowers on them. He'd put his arm around her waist and stroked her belly, swollen to the modest but promising fullness of an eighteen week pregnancy.

How much happiness there had been before he had to wake without her.

*

It is night. He finds himself drawn in the direction of the churchyard, and notices the church door is slightly ajar. Puzzled, he enters. 

Several candles glow softly. Dripping lilies perfume the scene. At the edges of hearing there is a sound like low breathing, or sobbing.

He discerns an orange heap upon the chancel step. It is his Ellie, prostrate beneath the shadow of the forbidding chancel arch.

He says her name, and she startles upright. He will not be prevented from kneeling beside her and throwing his arms around her.

Neither of them speak. He thinks vaguely of what Paul had told him about the arch above their heads, how it was Norman era, nearly a thousand years old, and etched with curious beasts and devils meant to protect, or perhaps curse - the relics of a superstitious past.

'This is where couples are usually married,' the vicar had said cheerfully, pointing at the spot beneath the arch where they now kneel together. 'Michelangelo once defined an arch as two powerful forces that meet at their weakest point to make a stronger whole – a good metaphor for marriage, don't you think? So, have you actually asked her yet?'

He draws Ellie back, cups her face in both hands, wipes her cheeks with his thumbs. She doesn't need to explain to him. He knows why she comes here.

He has knelt and done his penance too. 

*

An arrest.

A court date.

Jocelyn keeps her speech clipped and strictly businesslike. Ben is with her, and he tries to fumble out some word of condolence for all that has happened. 

And so it is over.

Their boys are safe, and Joe is behind bars – for now, at least. They have done it.

The lawyers tactfully leave the couple alone once the business is done. Ellie nestles up to him tremulously, and rests her head against the hollow of his clavicle.

She takes his hand. She lifts up her shirt, and presses his fingers to the scars on her abdomen.

 _Complications,_ she says, and her words cut like a scalpel. _M_ _aybe_ _it was selfish of me to keep him in the first place, when I knew the risks, when I'd had problems before, when I knew I might not… be able to…_

Her eyes screw up.

_But I wanted him. I wanted him. I wanted him._

She throws herself against his chest and seems to scream. She beats him with helpless fists, and he withstands the assault until she has no strength left, until he is able to hold her, a quivering mess, in his arms.

Everything she’s ever lost has claw marks on it. She’s likely to lose fingernails from how hard she clings to the things she loves.

There is no way to make sense of what happened. There is only the confusion of pain and loss and the certainty that they had simply loved too well, and held on to him too tightly to keep him.

He is the casualty of their mistakes as detectives, and their love. If it weren’t for Joe – if you hadn’t loved me – if only, if only… 

*

A year has passed. The court cases are over. They mark the anniversary in their own quiet way, and do not say a single word on the subject.

It is sunset by the time she comes to him, marching up the cliffs in her sensible shoes, wearing her bright orange coat.

'You never dress warm enough,' she complains, and throws a scarf around his neck. He adjusts it and says nothing. She stands by his side, and they look out across the ocean together, to that point where the sky meets the sea.

Hardy knows the horizon is nothing but an illusion, an invention of the eye and brain's need to make sense of endlessness in order to locate the self within it. He usually rejects that lie, but not today. Today, they both find that line where things make sense in the world's senselessness, and draw some satisfaction from it, some kind of meaning.

Ellie takes his hand, slips herself into the empty spaces between his fingers. She rests her head on his shoulder, in that way that lets him know, _I love you,_

_I love you still, the way I did when we first kissed;_

_the way I will when we are old._


End file.
